I hate spam. There’s little in this world I hate more than spam. Junk mail delivered to my house is a close second.
Years ago, I had my primary email address on a personal domain, as so many people do. This email address was in various places on the web well before slimy spammer started crawling the web to harvest addresses for email. Eventually this caught up with me and my email address started to average about 20 unsolicited emails per day. That’s 600 per month, and with no good spam program like Spam Assassin (which gained popularity in 2004 as it became an Apache Software Foundation project) available to me, the email address was rendered essentially useless.
I was furious — after all, this was my email address on a domain I paid for, and I felt as though it had been taken away from me. Checking email once or twice a week and having to sift through 85 emails to find the five you care about reading is just ridiculous.
So, I came up with a plan to create an email address on a subdomain that nobody would know, and to follow two basic rules:
- Never, ever post the email address on the web, and
- Never give my actual email address to another entity or person I don’t know and trust
Companies get what looks like an email account address but it really just a forwarder that points to my real email address — you only need to receive email from them, not send it, so what you give them doesn’t need to be an actual account. If they give away the email address, or if they get compromised, your real email address is still secret and you just delete the forwarder. Total time to create a forwarder is less than a minute, and deleting it later takes about as long.
Since I implemented this process in 2006, I’ve received exactly seven spam emails. One was from 1st Place Sports giving my email address to the Never Quit foundation, so I no longer trust 1st Place Sports with my personal information. Another was from USA Triathlon giving my email address to a local triathlon coach on three separate occasions (despite the fact that my marketing preferences instructed them not to), so I no longer trust them either. The other three were from companies that had security breaches (LinkedIn, Dropbox and RoadID), the latter of which wasn’t even aware it had happened until I contacted them to complain about it.
This system works perfectly. Perfectly.
A friend told me about 33Mail.com the other day, which appears to be doing roughly the same thing and they’ve turned it into a turnkey solution that creates your username as a subdomain and you create the forwarders simply by receiving an email on them. It doesn’t get much easier than that. If you have a premium account (which costs $12/year) there’s even a way to use your own domain in the email address by adjusting your MX records with your hosting company.
They’ve even added a way to respond from the forwarder, which on my system would require converting the forwarder to an actual account, for at least long enough to write the response. Brilliant!
So, if you want to stop receiving unwanted email, get yourself a shiny new email account and use 33Mail.com to hide it from companies and people you don’t trust to use it responsibly. You can sign up right on their main page and use it for free. If you need the features a premium account offers, I’m of the opinion that the value of their service is far greater than the $12 a year they charge.
